by Lee Gesmer | Oct 27, 2008 | Readings and Novelties
From the SF Chronicle’s obit of Hal Kant, aka “the Czar”, long-time attorney for the Grateful Dead:
When Ben & Jerry’s ice cream produced a new flavor, Cherry Garcia, in the early ’90s, McNally wrote in his book, the company did so without even discussing the idea with Garcia. Although Garcia was unconcerned when it was first brought to his attention – “At least they’re not naming a motor oil after me, man,” he said – Mr. Kant convinced him that the issue should be addressed.
As recounted by McNally, Mr. Kant told Garcia: “They will name a motor oilafter you if you don’t confront this, Jerry. You’ll have no control over your name at all.”
Garcia finally told Mr. Kant, “If it bothers you, go ahead.”
“In the next few years,” McNally wrote, “Jerry would have no problems in spending the large sum of money he’d earn thanks to the letter Mr. Kant wrote (to Ben & Jerry’s).” … Continue Reading
by Lee Gesmer | Oct 23, 2008 | Copyright
The 11th Circuit has ruled on a somewhat obscure but interesting issue of federal jurisdiction in copyright cases.
The Declaratory Judgment Act allows one who has been threatened with a suit to file suit first, and ask for a “declaration” of non-liability. In other words, the declaratory judgment makes one who fears becoming a defendant the procedural plaintiff. The roles of “plaintiff” and “defendant” are reversed, but the underlying issue remains the same. Declaratory judgment is simply a way that a threatened party who is unwilling to live with the risk of a lawsuit at some uncertain point in the future can force the issue.
However, the Declaratory Judgment Act is procedural; it does not give rise to federal court jurisdiction. This can create a problem for the declaratory judgment plaintiff, as demonstrated in the 11th Circuit case.
Registration with the U.S. Copyright Office is a jurisdictional prerequisite to a copyright infringement suit – no registration, no jurisdiction.
What if you are threatened with copyright infringement, but the owner of the work who has threatened you has not registered the work?
According to the 11th Circuit, you’re out of luck – the federal courts lack jurisdiction, and you cannot seek declaratory judgment. And, since the federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over copyright claims you can’t seek relief in state court either. You just have to wait until the party threatening you registers its copyright before you can move against it (or it can move against you).
The case is Stuart Weitzman, LLC v. Microcomputer Resources, Inc.
by Lee Gesmer | Oct 23, 2008 | Courts
Assume you’re interested in Jones Day v. Blockshopper, pending in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Go to Justia.com and click on the link US District Courts’ civil case filings. You can search for th
e docket of any federal district court case to find the case in Justia. Justia follows the Jones Day case here. If you click on that link and scroll down you’ll see the docket entries for the case (the last entry is #52 as of my writing of this post). You can click on the items to see filings and court orders.
Click on the “RSS” feed link on the top right of the Justia page for this case. 
Video Tutorial
Choose the RSS feed that you use. I use iGoogle.com, and once I click on the RSS feed I can select IGoogle. If you don’t have an RSS feed go to iGoogle.com and sign up. 
You are done – every time you check your iGoogle page you will see the titles of recent docket entries for this case, and you can click through to see the entry in more detail and access a filing or court order. You can follow as many cases as you like in this manner.
by Lee Gesmer | Oct 21, 2008 | Copyright, Trade Secrets
The following is background that may be necessary for some readers to understand the issues raised in the Thompson v. Zotero lawsuit, discussed below.
The Mozilla Firefox web browser (the second-most popular web browser, after Microsoft Internet Explorer) allows anyone with the talent and interest to develop “add-ons”. An add-on is a computer functionality that is added to and integrated with the Firefox browser. The Firefox user downloads the add-on from the web, and the add-on is automatically “installed” by Firefox. The add-on can be used, disabled or deleted, at the user’s choice. What makes this possible is that Firefox is an open source web browser, allowing developers to fully integrate their software with the browser. Developers can register their add-ons with the Firefox web repository, where over 6,000 add-ons are available. The add-ons are rated and critiqued by users, creating a reliable marketplace based on reputation.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has add-onsin name, but it is a much more restricted, less open and less integrated technology, and therefore is far less robust than the Firefox add-ons. For this reason, the Firefox add-ons are growing at an exponential rate, and their availability is contributing to the growing popularity of Firefox.
Some of the add-on technologies are so robust that they are taking market share from conventional, for-profit companies. This seems to be the case with the Zotero add-on, which may be taking market share from the Thompson Reuters product, EndNote Software. Both products help academics and researchers create academic bibliographies and manage citations. However, EndNote’s traditional, packaged software costs almost $300, whereas Zotero’s add-on is free and can be downloaded in seconds. It appears that some potential purchasers of Endnote are opting for the lesser functionality of Zotero given the better price and convenience.
With that as background, the lawsuit.
Zotero was created by employees of George Mason University, which is owned by the Commonwealth of Virginia. George Mason is a licensee of EndNote, and the license prohibits reverse-engineering. Thompson alleges that the George Mason developers reverse engineered EndNote in order to allow Zotero to convert proprietary EndNote files into open source Zotero files.
Now, a word about the law. It is clear that a software program may be reverse engineered (decompiled or disassembled, for example) as part of the process of developing a compatible product. This so-called “intermediate copying” was held to be copyright fair use in the Sega v. Accolade case in 1992 and was reaffirmed by no less a legal luminary than Judge Richard Posner in Assessment Technologies v. WIREdata decided in 2003.
However, it is also true (as the Assessment Technologies case points out) that this right of fair use may be restricted by a contract. (See Bowers v. Baystate Technologies (2003), to the same effect). A contract or license may prohibit reverse engineering or the creation of intermediate copies.
If George Mason’s contract with Thompson contained a “no reverse engineering” provision as Thompson asserts in its lawsuit, and George Mason did in fact reverse engineer EndNote to achieve compatibility, George Mason/Virginia may be liable for breach of contract. In fact, EndNote may have blocked the legal ability of any legal licensee of EndNote to reverse engineer EndNote for this purpose, since presumably not only George Mason but every proper licensee would be similarly restricted.
Whether this turns out to be the case – whether George Mason did reverse engineer EndNote to achieve compatibility, and whether EndNote has built a legal “Maginot Line” with no breaks or faults, across which no competitive developer can cross, remains to be seen as the facts of the case develop. It may be the case that the EndNote software did not require reverse engineering in order for Zotero to access its formats. It may also be the case that Zotera (or others in the marketplace, even nonlicensees) can technically and legally sidestep any contractual restrictions, and still provide conversion to EndNote file formats.
Whichever way this case goes, this dispute is interesting because it represents the clash of the old and the new: old, in the sense that savvy IP lawyers have been advising their clients for years to use contracts, in addition to copyright, to protect their software, and it appears that EndNote has tried to do this. New, in the sense that open source, when combined with new web technologies, may present a competitive and technical challenge to products like EndNote that good lawyering may be able to delay, but may prove unable to stop.
The complaint in this case can be accessed here.
by Lee Gesmer | Oct 21, 2008 | General
Today, the Supreme Court agreed to decide this issue:
Whether an individual who used a false means of identification but did not know it belonged to another person can be convicted of “aggravated identity theft” under 18 U.S.C. 1028A(a)(1).
The case involves an illegal alien who was prosecuted for use of false identity papers. It must be hard enough to be arrested as an illegal alien, but much worse to discovery that your punishment will not be deportation, but rather indictment and trial for aggravated identity theft, a felony punishable with two years imprisonment with no probation allowed. Your defense: you may have purchased false identification in order to work, but you didn’t know that you were using another person’s social security number, as opposed to a purely fictitious SSN.
This is the situation that Ignacio Carlos Flores-Figueroa faced when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that the government was not required to prove that Mr. Flores-Figueroa knew that he was using another person’s ID, and upheld his two year sentence under 18 U.S.C. 1028A(a)(1). This was the second time that the Eighth Circuit had ruled this way on this issue.
Surprisingly, another federal appellate court saw it differently, and held that knowledge is an element of the crime. Thus, the Supreme Court was presented with a split of authority between the federal circuits which it has agreed to resolve.
Here’s the question, legal beagles and lovers of grammar and clear writing. The law reads:
[w]hoever, during and in relation to any felony violation enumerated in [§ 1028A(c)], knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person shall, in addition to the punishment provided for such felony, be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 2 years.
The Eighth Circuit held that this law is unambiguous, and therefore it need not look beyond the language of the law to examine the legislative history and congressional intent. If held that “knowingly” only modifies “transfers, possesses, or uses”, and therefore the government is not required to prove that a defendant knew the means of identification belonged to another person (as opposed to a fictitious person).
In U.S. v. Villanueva-Sotelo the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia saw the issue differently, holding that the law was ambiguous, thereby permitting it to review the legislative history and the congressional purpose of the law. Based on this review the D.C. Circuit Court concluded that the mens rea (knowledge) requirement extends to the phrase “of another person,” meaning that the government must prove the defendant actually knew the identification in question belonged to someone else.
What do you think?
